Waiting By The Crossroads, Lying To The Devil: SYOC
by sinders-and-ash
Summary: The devil and the woman they call Wrath have made a wager. They often do. This particular bet hinges on the destinies of four young Shadowhunters newly arrived to New York - your OCs. What is this wager, what is its forfeit, and who shall win? What does that mean for the fates of our heroes? SYOC, open, please submit! Reviews are very appreciated also!
1. Chapter 1

If lies have a colour, they are the exact shade of red lipstick the woman they called Wrath wore the night she settled her wager with the devil.

She dressed in colours like a rattlesnake, dark jewel tones of green and red and purple, a viper bleeding venom from her tongue; she posed a dark, barely-there silhouette against the wide grey window of the restaurant, through which the crescent moon could be glimpsed. And her lipstick was dark indeed; darker, even, than the red wine swirling like smoke in the fluted glass she raised slowly to her mouth and sipped languidly, waiting for a response from the man opposite.

The devil was not unhandsome; he wore the glasses of a blind man, the dark surface reflecting the dancing light of the candle on the table between them. Ragged nails beat out an uneven tempo on the table as he mulled over this latest offer - he did not smile.

"You've grown brave, Wrath," he said and she did smile, showing very white, very even, very sharp teeth. She had not always been called Wrath; that was a skin she wore and discarded at will. She had lost her true name long ago, too long ago to remember, in precisely one of these wages - but that had been in the days when they had haggled over bowls of incense in a kasbah's wasteland, when they had met by ghostlight in an abandoned church with broken stained glass windows, when they had stood on separate sides of a summoning circle at a crossroads by night.

Those days were past. Now they dealt like civilised creatures, speaking over glasses of wine and candlelight while mundanes murmured softly around them, their words and the blare of sirens fading into the soundtrack of the urban landscape, and the city lights of traffic and offices blurred into novas beyond the window.

"I have always been brave," Wrath said. The loss of her name had been the first of these wafers that she had conceded; it had not been the last. "Perhaps now I am arrogant."

Would she lose this time?

And so, the bet.

"Five," the devil said.

"Ten," Wrath said, daring, and took another sip of her wine.

He looked amused. The half-laugh that escaped his lips was warm, affectionate.

"Seven," he said, and she let it be.

Seven, then. Seven was a good number indeed. Seven was a powerful, magical number. Let it be, then.

She put her chin in her hand and gazed across the table at the demon. The world continued around them, heedless that fates were being crafted, painstakingly, only a few inches away.

"Seven months," the devil continued. "I doubt it shall take that long anyway-"

Mocking. Was he mocking her?

She smiled against the palm of her hand. "Have a little faith."

"Faith is what placed me in this uncomfortable situation," the man-who-was-not-a-man replied. "Faith and providence. You have, I presume, selected a venue for our game?"

"I have," she said lightly. "The hallowed ground - the sacramented land - the Institute of New York."

Now the devil did smile. It was a frightening expression, to be sure. "Choose your gladiator wisely, darling," the devil said. "I don't think you'll survive another one of my victories."

* * *

 _Hello! And welcome to my SYOC!_

 _It is set in New York, post-Lady Midnight but hopefully spoiler free, and will follow a small group of Shadowhunters at the Institute who become embroiled in a wager between the devil and a woman they call Wrath. What is the wager? Well, that's the mystery, isn't it?_

 _I'm looking for four main characters (two boys, two girls), with four supporting characters also due to appear (two boys, two girls). Characters will be selected based on three factors: how interesting they are, the story options they provide, and the detail shown in the submission forms. Please PM the following form to me with the subject line of your character's full name._

 _Thank you so much, and I hope you all submit an OC._

* * *

 **NAME:**

 **AGE:**

 **GENDER:**

 **PERSONALITY:**

 **GREATEST FEAR:**

 **GREATEST FLAW:**

 **APPEARANCE** :

 **TYPICAL CLOTHING:**

 **PREFERRED WEAPON:**

 **BACKGROUND:**

 **HOME:**

 **FAMILY:**

 **SEXUAL ORIENTATION:**

 **PAST ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS:**

 **SKILLS:**

 **OPINION OF DOWNWORLDERS:**

 **OPINION OF** **THE CLAVE:**

 **WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM IN THE** **DARK WAR?:**


	2. Chapter 2

There are some rules every father teaches his daughter, and though he was not and never was her father, the arsonist taught Sin these rules also:

1) Keep your wrist locked when you punch.

2) Don't challenge the devil to a wager you aren't certain you can win.

3) Never let the invisible men known you can see them.

Sin had kept these rules faithfully.

But the day came when the invisible men saw her.

* * *

Imagine, if you will, the end of the world.

"Iliya."

Imagine, if you will, a frozen moment, where everything you were, everything you knew and believed, is rended apart like scrap metal, discarded, a frozen, burning moment where blood boils and yet your nerves and bones freeze where they are, rooted to the ground.

"Oh, Angel, no."

Imagine, if you will, a girl. Her seraph blade glows in her hand, a fallen star without source, and in this awful, frozen, moment, her blood hangs impossibly in the air. She is an angel caught, wax wings and all, in the instant she touched the edge of the sun.

" _Iliya!_ "

Every angel must fall.

Can you feel your parabatai rune burning?

* * *

Kesey woke up. That shouldn't have been a surprise, not after all this time, but it was. Her lungs felt raw, but that panic and pain that had pulsed powerfully through her dream, that was gone. It had drained, all of that agony and angst and awfulness, like she had cut into her wrist and bled it all out between dream and wake.

The sky was grey beyond the garden of the Atlantan Institute, tinged purple and black at the edges like a festering wound. The window was open, a quiet breeze stirring the pages on Kesey's desk and the curtains that clustered about her bed. A waterwitch perched on the sill ruffled its feathers and regarded her balefully with eyes like jet. The colour of ichor, those eyes.

 _Steer the Angel my hands to war..._

Today was a new morning, and the parabatai rune above her heart was cool and dead once more. The last night she would stay in this hushed, hallowed Institute, with these halls haunted by Iliya's ghost, the bed that might have been made of nails for all the rest it had offered of late.

The New York Institute awaited.


	3. Chapter 3

You want to teach a bird to talk rather than to sing, you slit its tongue.

Every fool knew that.

Sin knew that.

You could teach a bird to talk, but you couldn't teach it to tell the truth. There was the problem. Its little forked tongue, dripping black blood, would spit lies for sunrise to sunset, vicious, venomous, poisonous lies until you almost wished again for those haunting empty tunes of theirs and nothing more, for their beak to shut and their harsh croaking voice to fall silent once and forever more.

The arsonist had taught Sin how to slit a crow's tongue, and also how to cut out a wren's heart, and also how to spill a vulture's innards and read the future in its entrails.

Birds' tongues could lie but their guts never did.

Augury, the arsonist called it - you could read the future anywhere, after all, if you were willing to look closer, squint a little, bleed from your eyes. You could read it in their flight patterns, in the speckles on a moulted feather, in their innards and in the very blackest part of the very centre of their eyes (if they let you get that close, of course).

The arsonist read a hundred, a thousand futures. He drew them all out and then Sin burned them, like that would keep them from happening, like that would keep the invisible men at bay. How long? Long enough.

She watched the little futures in the fire curl into little black ringlets and said nothing. She usually did say nothing.

Sin's tongue had not been slit, but she had the nasty habit of telling lies anyway.

They had always kept birds in little wicker and silver cages hanging from the exposed rafters of the workshop. They shook back and forth, those cages, rather precariously whenever a door or window was open, accompanied by a chorus of bitter mistruths from those who had slit tongues and panicked trilled songs from those who did not. And then the air would still, and the cages would still, and the birds would fall silent once more.

As though they had forgotten they were in a cage at all.

Sin thought she could sympathise.

You could teach a bird to speak, and you could read the future in its guts, but most importantly - and the reason the arsonist kept the birds at all - you could feed the prettiest of them to the demons.

Demons liked to consume elegance, you see, and devour beauty. You could make deals with them, then - ask them for secrets or for answers or for the truth, and never ever mix up the three. Ask them for a gift or a wish or a debt, and never, ever, mix up the three. Ask them for a past or a present or a future and never, ever, mix up the three. So long as you fed them something beautiful from a cafe, they were happy to oblige.

And Sin was beautiful indeed.

* * *

The sky over Dublin was a bruise stretching from one horizon to the other, interrupted only by the tall silver spire that shone skyward as though to pierce the sun itself, marking precisely the city centre a few kilometres from where Finn stood, waiting for something he could not name.

The roof of the shopping centre was wide and grey and concrete and empty; he could pace about twenty metres without coming too close to the edge, without fear of being seen, even if he had not taken care to glamour himself before making his way up. On the street below, gangs of teenagers his own age, some younger and some older, were beginning to flood the street. A trio of typically scruffy Trinity artists cut across the path of a young couple dressed in the navy uniform of a Catholic school, the girl's hair crimson. A group of primary school sheepstealers on a school tour, making a shortcut across to Moore Street, following in the footsteps of ancient rebels as they tried to avoid being swallowed up by the hordes of adolescent jackeens charging between school door and football pitch. Their voices floating up to him, devoid of meaning. They spoke of homework, of essay deadlines, of sports clubs and relationship drama and idle gossip. Utterly alien.

Lucas would expect him back at the Institute soon enough. There would be a Portal there, vibrant and electric, reailer than real could be. Finn still sometimes found it hard to explain exactly how magic looked, how one could differentiate that which was seen and that which was Seen. Unreality was too real, the colours too bright, the movements too fluid and seamless, the quality too crisp, as though the Downworld was in high defintion while the rest of the world was still stuck with VCRs and cassette tapes. Part of the reason Finn despised travelling by Portal - it was a single moment of utter madness, of tasting an entire world with every breath you took, of hearing sounds with such utter clarity they could have originated from within your own skull, of seeing things so utterly clearly that it was as though you had never seen before... and then it was over.

The first second after travelling by Portal was so utterly cold, empty, dark, it was as though an entire world had begun and lived and died between one moment and the next and no one had noticed except Finn.

Not that he was too fond of flying either. It wasn't a fear of heights - after all, he had climbed onto this roof with his fingernails and sneakers and little else to help. Finn trusted in the strength of his own tendons, the skill of his hands and the surety of his limbs and muscles - none of which could help him when he was stuck in a tin can a mile above the earth, utterly reliant on the skill and attention span of a mundane who couldn't even perceive the _ale_ and the Stymphalian birds passing by the craft, so close their wings sometimes hit the windows.

So Finn would endure the Portal for now.

At least he was heading somewhere mildly exciting, like New York City. Murders and mayhem and monsters, that's what the never-sleeping city was all about - a far cry from the dull mundanity of _an Baile Atha Cliath_ , where the biggest excitement was whether the Dubs or the Kingdom would go home with Sam McGuire. Finn had been born and raised within the city limits - he was a Northside boy born and raised on the red line, the Liffey in his veins and smoke in his lungs, green, red and yellow painted on his heart, but he did not think he would miss the town much. He hadn't, while he was away at the Academy. Too much blood had been shed in the Pale for him to spend any sleepless nights pining for it.

Lucas would be waiting.

Well, let him wait. Finn would place his mark upon this soil just once more before he left it. Let this be his American wake.

He had been following this dearg due for perhaps a few hours - about as long as it had been following its own prey, shadowing it as Finn shadowed the demon. Dearg due could be very particular - Finn could not have been certain of victory had he merely loosed an arrow or seraph blade in its direction an hour ago. He had to wait until it let down its guard, moved between living and dead, and in that moment between monster and corpse it would be mortal and it would be killable.

The young couple turned away from the crowd. The girl's hair was very, very red. The boy's eyes were very, very dark.

The demon's blood would be very, very black.

Finn moved with the confidence of one raised among the rooftops. A few steps took him to the railing; a few steps took him beyond. He was strong enough to throw himself from one roof to another - graceful enough to drop a few levels and roll and drop again - skilled enough to do so utterly silently and pull a crossbow bolt from his belt as he did so.

He landed in an empty alley and rolled and came up steady, moving forward rapidly, parallel to the path the dearg due and its prey would have taken. He had a narrow window of opportunity, but he wasn't too worried.

This wasn't his first hunt, after all.

Finn found the couple in the empty little street with graffiti strewn around them. The boy had pinned the girl to the wall. Her hair spilled like blood over her shoulders as she kissed his throat. The shadows under his eyes were like bruises.

" _In ainm an Dlí_ ," Finn said, rather boredly, raising his crossbow to his shoulder. So many of the creatures of this land understood only the Old Tongue. They had walked this land long before any other had claimed precedence over its people. "I suggest you let the mundane go before I put a bolt in those dead eyes of yours."

The boy didn't move. As though he hadn't heard Finn. He hadn't. But the girl - the monster in the girl's skin - the dearg due - she moved those bright blue eyes of hers measuredly over towards Finn and her bloody smile opened wider and wider and wider, wider than her lips and skin would allow, a gaping wound of a smile that showed teeth like needles, teeth like daggers, her skin like grey paper rotting beneath Finn's gaze and where she touched the mundane boy he began to rot also and that was when Finn's bolt found its home in the throat of the demon.

She made a sound, almost a cough of surprise, and the mundane boy stumbled back, his skin still peeling where the dearg due had laid hands on him, but Finn ignored him as he moved forward.

How strange to be hunting in the daytime again.

" _Fán_ ," he began, ordering it to stay where it was but the demon had already reached a hand, fingernails becoming talons, to wrench the runed weapon from its throat, flesh burning where it came into contact with the metal. Hollowed pits where bright blue eyes lay, stolen eyes, stared into Finn's face with a venom. Its mouth was still bloody.

It attacked. Faster and fleeter than he had expected, no doubt well fed. They exchanged blows - Finn avoiding the wicked edge of its talons, looking for an opening, trying to goad it into moving yet further into that state of not-quite-humanity, not-quite-monstrosity. Always easier when they were engorged on blood, like swollen ticks.

He clipped it with a well-timed gancho giratoria kick that sent it stumbling into a nearby bin, some abandoned wooden pallets, and kept it at bay by sinking another two bolts into its cheek and abdomen.

It wasn't a vampire, but it would do.

 **YOU'RE NOT GOING TO HURT ME** , the demon said.

 **YOU'RE NOT GOING TO HURT ME** , the demon said.

 **YOU'RE NOT GOING TO HURT ME** , the girl said.

Her hair was red. No. Black. Ink. Charcoal. Blacker than black. Brown skin. Hollow cheekbones and tangled waves of hair, narrow green eyes and a long, narrow nose, piercings dripping from one ear, and white teeth the same colour as her ivory skin and silvery platinum hair, a sharp contrast to her deep brown eyes, the narrow shape of her face, framed by strawberry-red curls touching her chin...

Beautiful. More beautiful than beautiful could be.

Finn raised his crossbow again to put a bolt in its heart, lest his mind be swayed, and the dearg due moved with a violent explosion of movement and next thing Finn knew he was pinned against the red brick wall of the building behind him, and the demon had its talons digging into his throat.

He scrambled for his seraph blade.

 **NO** , the demon said. **NO, NOT YOU.**

It sounded almost petulant.

 **STARKWEATHER** , the demon said. **YOU'LL WISH I KILLED YOU NOW.**

Finn's fingers curled around his blade. He named it in the same moment he slashed the demon's throat - Remiel cut deep, and brought a tidal wave of ichor. The dearg due stumbled back and folded in on itself, smaller and smaller and then it was gone and Finn hit the ground, back to the wall, and rubbed his throat.

Bruises in the morning. Definitely.

There was a tinny squawking emanating from the pocket of his trench coat. He found the small hard shape of his phone and answered with some trepidation.

"You're late," Lucas said, and hung up again.

* * *

Kesey's suitcase thudded down each step after her, like a corpse falling down the stairs, keeping time almost exactly with the gentle tick tick tick of the golden pocket watch around her neck. She couldn't say why the sound of the watch bothered her so much in recent days, but it did - it did.

Like time was finite, so much sand in cupped hands, and she couldn't hold onto it no matter how she tried.

The satanique that had perched on her windowsill that morning had taken wing and now circled ceaselessly about the tallest point of the Atlanta Institute, wavering upon an uncertain thermal before climbing higher, higher, higher. As a child, her grandfather had always told her that water witches were the souls of dead captains who had been cruel in life, doomed to spend their existence searching their seas for their lost vessels and the stars for the crew they had mistreated. She could almost believe it now - in the early morning dusk, a few pale glimmers of aureate light still shone forth.

Lucifers, Kellan Anxocaer would have called them, morning stars that had forgotten to fall when they ought.

Kesey was not the only watching the bird.

"That," Ademar Anxocaer was saying thoughtfully to his youngest child as Kesey's younger brother followed his father's gaze towards the heavens, curly hair bouncing with every movement of his head. "Is one very lost petrel." As the older man spoke he absently smoothed down the wild mess of Rex's hair, a job that could never be more than half-completed no matter how hard they tried, and looked thoughtful. "This far inland, there must be a very dangerous storm coming." His lone remaining eye met his daughter's silver-grey eyes, and he laughed, a broad and open sound as though he were inviting others to join in if they wished. "Ah, here it comes!"

"Ha ha ha," Kesey said dryly, pronouncing each syllable crisply, her tone droll and as dry as the Gobi. Her suitcase crashed down a final step and then shuddered across the cobblestones behind her. "You're so _funny._ "

It almost hurt to speak. Still. Her lungs still felt raw, peeled open, somehow exposed - like she had breathed smoke in reality and not merely in those awful dreams of hers where the past played out endlessly and relentlessly. The past was a scalpel. It had dug deep last night.

She was glad to be leaving. She shouldn't have been - knowing it meant leaving her father and her mother and Rex and Aunt Percy. But she was - knowing she was leaving the place where her grandmother had died, where her grandfather had died, where Iliya had ...

Well.

They had ordered her a taxi. She could see the canary colour of it beyond the wrought iron gates of the Institute, bright and vibrant against the green of the hedges that surrounded it. How beautifully mundane - elegantly human. Key liked that. No doubt that had been her mother's influence, although really what other choice had they had? There were few warlocks in Georgia this time of the year, and even fewer of good repute that could be trusted to construct a Portal. All the reliable ones seemed to migrate further east, like a flock of geese, citing vague complaints about _unseasonable weather_ and _temperamental ley lines_.

So Kesey was taking a train to New York. She had enough mundane family that she recognised this experience would be a chore rather than an adventure, but any change of scenery would be a positive one. She was nearly there. She was nearly free.

Her mother wrapped one arm around her daughter in a half-hug, as though anymore would be too dramatic, too final, and smiled a sweet smile. They had already said their goodbyes the night before - today was to be as simple as simple could be. "Be careful, okay?"

They walked a little way down the path. Kesey's suitcase managed to sound threatening even on gravel.

"If you need us, we're just a Portal away," her father added, taking her hand in his own, considerably larger hand, and pressing something wrapped in a white cloth into her palm, folding her fingers tightly over the shape.

The iron gates creaked open like a fox call. The sky was very dark beyond them.

"Don't forget about us," Rex demanded, and rushed forward to envelop his older sister in a hug as best he could. Kesey almost laughed - almost - and wrapped her arms tightly around him for a brief moment.

She stepped through the gates. She turned to face the Institute, and her family.

"I'll see you at Christmas," she said. "I will definitely not forget you."

The gates creaked shut, very slowly and yet far quicker than she had ever imagined. She walked down to the taxi and put her suitcase into the trunk.

If the poor taxi driver asked why a girl needed collection from an abandoned church, he was polite enough not to ask. She wondered what he was thinking as she slid into the back seat, idly poking at a paint-spattered loose thread at her knee.

Perhaps he believed her a ghost.


End file.
